Look What The Cats Dug Up

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Look What The Cats Dug Up by Chris Rose

I live in a town where lots of people live, a town which is a suburb of a city where millions of people live. It’s very crowded. Where I live there is one apartment block after another. I look out of my window and if I look to the left I can see another apartment block. If I look to the right I can see the railway and the local train station, and after that there are more apartment blocks. If I look straight ahead of me I can see another apartment block. But if I look straight down, I can see something different.

If I look straight down I can see a garden. It’s not a big garden – it’s about fifteen metres long and fifteen metres wide. It’s almost square-shaped. The space is as big as a small apartment block. The garden is there like a hole in the middle of lots of other apartment blocks. It is a space left by an apartment block which was bombed in the Second World War and – unlike all the other blocks around it – never rebuilt.

An old woman lives in this garden. Well, to be accurate, she doesn’t exactly live in the garden. She has a very small two-storey house in the corner of the garden. There only seem to be two rooms in her house, one room downstairs and one room upstairs, but I don’t really know because I’ve never been in it. But that’s what it looks like from the outside. The woman who lives is the garden looks very old, but nobody is really sure how old she is.

In her garden, she mostly grows oranges and lemons, and in the winter when the oranges are in season, the dark green trees in the garden are covered in hundreds and hundreds of tiny orange dots. It’s really beautiful. You can lean over the balcony and call the old woman, and if you lower down a basket on a piece of rope, she’ll fill up the basket for you with oranges. The oranges have quite a bitter taste, to tell the truth, they’re not sweet at all, and they’re full of pips, but I always think that the old woman is very kind to give away all her oranges anyhow.

The old woman isn’t the only one who lives in the garden, though. About ten stray cats live there too. I say “about ten”, because there always seem to be different cats there. Sometimes you can look down and there are only three or four cats lying out in the sun or in the shade of one of the orange trees. Other times, though, especially if you throw a leftover bit of fish over the balcony for the cats to have, lots of them come running, sometimes as many as twelve, sometimes too many to count.

A lot of people want to come and live where I live now. The nearby city with millions of people who live in it is too crowded, and the prices of flats in the city are very high. A lot of people want to move out of the city to the small town where I live, because it’s a bit cheaper and a bit quieter.

Some people who live in my apartment block are saying that the old woman has been looking very unhappy recently. My neighbours are worried because they say that the old woman is very old and that she isn’t well and that if she dies, someone will come and build another apartment block on the space where her small, green garden is. The people who live in our apartment block – me included – love the small garden. It’s beautiful to wake up in the morning and go out onto the balcony and look at the orange and lemon trees, and the small vine where she grows grapes to make wine in the autumn, and the stray cats asleep in the sun.